Historically, computer systems and databases have contained data in incompatible formats. As the organizations utilizing these systems and databases became more automated and computerized, the need to share data over computer networks, such as the Internet, became more and more prevalent. Due to this need, standard formats for the sharing of data were developed.
One such standard format developed is extensible Markup Language (“XML”). XML is a very hierarchical data format, which includes a multitude of data structures having parent-child relationships. In the XML data format, the children of each parent may have further children, which in turn may have still further children, and so on. XML is also written in plain text and thus is a world-wide standard for ‘tagging’ data. Due to the advent of this standard data format, many computer users have converted the aforementioned databases to the standard XML data format. The XML format also allows computer users to tailor their data to specific documents using schemas. Schemas provide mechanisms to define and describe the structure, content, and to some extent semantics of XML documents.
However, in many instances schemas are not always available to the users of electronic documents having a hierarchical format such as XML. While schemas are not required constructs in the XML data format, many document authors rely on schemas as a means of communicating narrowly tailored data with other users. For example, a financial services company may have its own schema defining the structure and content its XML documents.
With the ease of availability of the personal computer, many users have become proficient in their use and more specifically, in using electronic spreadsheet application programs. Some software application programs have been developed which are capable of “inferring” a schema from hierarchical structured data, however none of these programs are capable of inferring schemas from XML data for use in a spreadsheet environment.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.